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From Byzantium to Holy RussiaNikodim Kondakov (1844-1925) and the Invention of the Icon

Ivan Foletti

Tracing the life and work of Nikodim Kondakov, a pioneer in the field of late Antiquity and Byzantium in eastern Europe, this biography is a true tale of adventure. It follows the complicated and challenging events in Kondakov’s life before and after the Russian Revolution, from his humble beginnings to his university studies and analyzes his inspired creation of an innovative and precocious study of art history in Russia. From a brilliant and successful career to the trauma endured during the Russian Revolution, the story becomes one of wandering and dependence; nevertheless, and in spite of the shift in history and in his own life, Kondakov’s studies sketch a vast geography of Late Antique and medieval culture from the Mediterranean to the Urals. The work approaches distant horizons, giving a glimpse at the migrations from Asia and the inception of medieval Europe with its Christian values; and it travels the paths of history along trails marked by artifacts and monuments. Reconstructing the personal and existential events in Nikodim Kondakov’s life contributes to the understanding of a critical phase in the founding of art history and, more broadly, the histories of Russia and of the countries the scholar traversed during a long life filled with tribulations.

The Mystic CaveA History of the Nativity Church at Bethlehem

Michele Bacci

The present work is the first monographic book published in English, since 1910, on the history of the Nativity Church in Bethlehem. In comparison to other Holy Land monuments, this particular site has undergone relatively minor alterations in the course of time. Spared from the destructions that affected other holy sites, such as the Holy Sepulchre, the basilica at Bethlehem stands out for its well-preserved architecture, dating from the late 6th century, and its exuberant mosaic décors completed in 1169, in the period of Crusader rule in Palestine. This book offers a general description of the vicissitudes of the holy site since its very beginnings in Late Antiquity until the present times, with a special focus on the ways in which the complex relationship between the underground holy site, the Nativity cave, housing the very spot of Christ’s birthplace and the manger, and the sumptuously decorated upper church, came to be variously negotiated in the course of time by means of different forms of mise-en-scène. The book is accompanied by a rich apparatus of colour illustrations, plans, and a bibliographic appendix.

The Fifth Century in Rome: Art, Liturgy, Patronage

Ivan Foletti and Manuela Gianandrea eds

With articles by Sible de Blaauw, Olof Brandt, Zuzana Frantová and Dale Kinney

The objective of this book is to draw attention to fifth-century Rome – to those hundred years which even today need to be looked at from different perspectives. It is a key moment, a border between worlds, far too important not to receive further attention.

The studies, presented together here, aim to respond to new demands: the art object remains at the centre, but with a new search for its context. This context would be unthinkable without the key concept of co-existence – between popular and elite culture, popes and emperors, pagans and Christians. As well as between liturgy – intrinsically necessary to the Christian world – and patronage – the intellectual project which stems from a cultural concept. Moreover, co-existence is crucial between the mindset of the Roman elites (the tradition inscribed in the city’s DNA), and new internal and external demands arising from this rich moment in the history of Rome.

The fifth-century, studied in this book, is the moment in which future and past meet, where Antique and Christian coincide. An artistic moment with a single identifying feature: its incredibly rich complexity.

The Antique Memory and the Middle Ages

This volume was born from a desire to leave a tangible trace of the scholarly encounters that have taken place in the past two years at the Center for Early Medieval Studies, Department of Art History, Masaryk University in Brno. Speaking in various forums – structured courses as well as stand-alone lectures – Xavier Barral i Altet, Nicolas Bock, Valentina Cantone, Herbert Kessler, Serena Romano, Elisabetta Scirocco, and Jean-Michel Spieser have sparked exciting discussions of what continues to be known as the Middle Ages.

The common denominator that unites all of the scholarly work presented here was the dialogue between the medieval "present" and the Antique world: from Venice to Campania to Milan, from Constantinople to Burgundy, there had emerged an intellectual and visual experience that suggests the medieval period was a uniquely fertile moment for the engagement with the heritage of Antiquity, filtered and mediated in different ways, but ever present.

The purpose of this volume is to understand why and how patterns, images and ideas from the mythical (but visible) ancient past were received throughout the medieval millennium. We seek to understand why, hic et nunc, clients and workshops deliberately chose to speak in a "classicizing" aesthetic language, and to appropriate concepts belonging to the Antique tradition wholesale.

Objects of MemoryMemory of Objects

Alžběta Filipová, Zuzana Frantová, Francesco Lovino (eds.)

This publication presents the proceedings of an International PhD student conference, held on December 5–6, 2013, organized in cooperation with the Dipartimento dei Beni culturali: archeologia, storia dell'arte, del cinema e della musica, University of Padua (Italy), and the Centre of Early Medieval Studies, Department of Art History, Masaryk University in Brno. The central topic of the conference was the study of artworks which are intrinsically linked to the notion of memory. The aims of the organizers were twofold: first of all, to understand how icons, books, reliquaries and other artefacts became vehicles of meanings, which are now mostly incomprehensible, but must have been clear to its contemporary audiences, and second, to understand how these objects could have changed the memory of the places in which they were preserved. The essays in this book thus represent some of the perspectives by which an object can be seen in its historicity.

The Face of the Dead and the Early Christian World

Peter Brown has described the situation of the holy bodies in the Early Christian period like a “place between Earth and Heaven”. The principal aim of this book is precisely to deal with this intersection between two worlds, expressed by the Dead, and in particularly by his images, and his faces.

The first part of this book looks into the portrait and its function, and the reason for which Late Antiquity, following a custom it inherited from previous eras, covered itself with individual images of the deceased. As in previous eras, the portrait appears, above all, to be an attempt to express the individual in his or her entirety; the techniques and “instruments” perfected in the course of the 3rd century, however, lead to divergent formal and conceptual results.

The second question, answered more briefly, deals with the perception and representation of the dead body as a whole, defined by David Le Breton as “la souche identitaire de l'homme.” The question asked is a fundamental one, since we are confronted with humanity itself after its passage to that which lies beyond: whether the body becomes just a memory or whether it preserves the real presence of the man who it once was.